Egypt
Bedouins, Cassettes and Technologies of Public Culture
Discotheques and taxicabs all over Egypt last January were playing the songs of a new pop star. No one knew exactly where “the Earthquake of ’88” (his biographer’s term) had come from, but everyone seemed to think Ali Hemida was a Bedouin. Some said he came from Sinai; others said Libya. His music was unusual, his dialect not Egyptian, and his lyrics ("wearing silk, she’s like a gazelle, henna-painted hands") evoked the life of desert Arabs.
Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor and Textile Worker
Ellis Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor and Textile Worker: Class and Politics in Egypt, 1930-1952 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986).
The critique of modernization theory that began in the late 1960s had an especially significant impact on a new generation of Western scholars who rejected the prevailing academic focus on political elites to the exclusion of other political forces. Not only were elites largely studied in isolation from the masses they dominated, but the masses themselves were not attributed any role in the political process. Today, this younger generation of scholars, working in the political economy paradigm, is beginning to publish the results of its research on the role of the masses in politics.
Egypt: A New Secularism?
Arab political and social thought in the 1960s was dominated by secular conceptions, including Arab nationalism, Arab socialism and Marxism. Even after the 1967 war, when the attraction of these ideologies began to wane, the immediate “self-criticism after the defeat” (to cite the title of Sadiq al-Azm’s famous book) maintained a militantly secular and revolutionary stance. [1] The emerging Palestinian resistance movement put forward slogans of armed struggle and people’s war.
Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt
Judith Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
This is more than a general treatise about women in Egypt. It is a subtle and adroit analysis of gender and class during the transformation of Egyptian society in the nineteenth century and it is this underlying theme that makes Judith Tucker’s work challenging reading. She provides an interesting theoretical approach in which both an anthropologist, used to working on women’s issues within peripheral, local community settings, and an historian, concerned with the social and economic history of women and social class, can find a common ground. “The history of women,” Tucker states in her introduction,
Sivan, Radical Islam; Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt
Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985.)
Gilles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharoah (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985.) Translated from the French by Jon Rothschild.
Sinai for the Coffee Table
Dani Rabinowitz, Ru’ah Sinai (The Sinai Spirit) (Tel Aviv: Adam Publishers, 1987). [Hebrew]
Ever since Israel occupied the Sinai desert in 1967, that piece of earth has consistently made Israeli headlines. Its media presence was only enhanced after Camp David and Israel’s withdrawal in 1979 and 1982. The public’s insatiable interest in the Sinai is today reflected in copious newspaper articles, books both popular and scholarly, expensive coffee-table books, top 40 pop tunes and diverse television programs. Central to this preoccupation is the Israeli fascination with the Bedouins.
The Egyptian Left After the Debacle
The debacle suffered by the Egyptian left at the polls in 1987 — 2 percent of the vote as compared to 4.5 percent in the 1984 parliamentary elections — provoked a soul-searching debate in Tagammu‘, the legal party of the left.
Prison, Gender, Praxis
Do you, too, believe that I betrayed my motherhood when I left you, against my will, to go to prison?…. I have read an article by the Moroccan writer Hadiya Sa‘id…she expressed a point of view maintained by some of our friends who love me and are concerned about you. She says that I must cease my political work and leave it to Husayn, for the sake of you children…. [1]
So writes Farida al-Naqqash to her daughter in 1981, during her second confinement in the Barrages women’s prison just north of Cairo.
“The Lion’s Right to Roar in His Cage”
Nabil al-Hilali has been active as a labor and civil liberties lawyer in Egypt since the 1950s. He serves on the executive committees of the Egyptian Bar Association and the International Committee of Democratic Jurists. He ran as an independent in the parliamentary elections of April 1987. In 1986 he was acquitted after a long trail on charges of being a member of the illegal Egyptian Communist Party. His defense in that trial has been published in Beirut as a small book called In Defense of Liberty. Joe Stork interviewed him in Cairo in February 1987.
How long have you been engaged in this work of defending workers and political prisoners?
38 years, sometimes as a lawyer and sometimes as a defendant myself.
Interview with Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
Mohamed Sid-Ahmed is a Contributing Editor of this magazine and Managing Editor of Al-Ahali, the weekly of Egypt’s left opposition party, Tagammu‘. Joe Stork spoke with him in Washington in early May.
You recently attended the Palestine National Council meeting in Algiers. What were your impressions?
The Ear of Authority
A confidential report compiled in October 1966 by the Criminal Investigation office of the Egyptian army accused Ahmad Hasan, former member of parliament and former government-appointed head of his village, of 11 “criminal and terrorist” offenses.
Rescheduling the Camp David Debt
Egypt’s current debt crisis is one of the fruits of Camp David. Much of the principal and interest now in arrears or coming due was contracted in the heady days when oil prices were soaring and the treaty with Israel and military alliance with Washington certified Egypt as a credit-worthy customer for Western banks and governments. The United States in particular stepped up its economic and military lending to Cairo.
Egypt’s New Political Map
Compared with 1984, the atmosphere of the 1987 Egyptian elections was decidedly less free. The outcry of the opposition in 1984 primarily concerned the forged results on election day itself. [1] In 1987, the pressure on the opposition during the campaign was much stronger. The Emergency Law, extended almost routinely every year since Husni Mubarak came to power, offers the regime an array of measures for interfering in the campaign. Administrative detention was used to intimidate opposition militants. A country-wide wave of arrests of Muslim Brothers, particularly prospective poll watchers, started a few days before the elections. According to the Amal Party newspaper, Al-Sha‘b, ten days later more than a thousand were still detained.
Egyptian Political Parties
Alliance (Tahaluf)
An opposition list formed for the 1987 elections by the Socialist Labor Party, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Socialist Liberals Party. Officially identified as the SLP list, since the Muslim Brotherhood, as a religious organization, cannot legally participate in elections.
Egypt’s Elections
If the riots of February 1986 ushered in a year of doubt about the future of Husni Mubarak’s regime, the events of early 1987 appear to indicate that he has consolidated his position both domestically and internationally. [1] Mubarak upstaged the opposition and enhanced his legitimacy by calling new parliamentary elections in which opposition forces were able to significantly increase their representation in the National Assembly. The government party, however, remains firmly in control of the parliament, virtually assuring the president's renomination in the fall for another six-year term, and approval of a new standby loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund.
Egypt: A Primer
The People
Nearly 50 million Egyptians live in this flat, hot, dry land the size of Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas combined. Most of them are crowded into a fertile strip along the Nile River and its delta. In greater Cairo, the 17th largest city in the world, population density is an astounding 27,092 people per square kilometer. Egypt‘s population is growing at a rate of 2.52 percent per year; almost half of Egyptian woman are in their childbearing years, marriage is nearly universal and contraception was practiced by only 24 percent of couples in 1982. Egypt is also becoming increasingly urban. By 1976 one-third of its people lived in cities of over 100,000.
The President and the Field Marshal
Husni Mubarak succeeded Anwar al-Sadat in October 1981 at a time of troubled civil-military relations. Sadat’s pursuit of a separate peace with Israel after the war in 1973 raised important questions about the military’s future role, size and sources of weapons. If Egypt was no longer at war, it would no longer need its huge military establishment. Over the following decade, the number of men under arms declined as Sadat began to convert the military into a rapid strike force that could intervene in the Horn of Africa, the Gulf or Libya.
From the Editors (July/August 1987)
At the beginning of June, a new, heavily armored Mercedes arrived in Cairo. It had been ordered for the new US ambassador to Egypt, Frank Wisner. Just a week earlier, in the heart of the crowded capital, a group calling itself Egypt’s Revolution had ambushed a car carrying three US Embassy staff, including the chief of embassy security. The attackers raked the car with automatic gunfire. Some good defensive driving allowed the Americans to escape with only superficial wounds. Security experts dispatched from the US described the attack as “very professional” and “well-planned.”
The Fate of the Family Farm
Samir Radwan and Eddy Lee, Agrarian Change in Egypt, An Anatomy of Rural Poverty (London: Croom Helm, for the International Labor Organisation, 1986).
Alan Richards, ed., Food, States and Peasants, Analyses of the Agrarian Question in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986).
These two books are welcome additions to the sparse literature on recent agricultural development and agrarian change in the Middle East. Neither makes easy reading, but students of both economic and social change in the Middle East (mainly Turkey and Egypt) and agrarian change in general will find them useful.
